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IF LIFE IS GRIM FOR OBSERVERS ON TUNA BOATS, IT IS difficult too for spies. "I
wanted to get off that boat so bad, so many times," Sam LaBudde says. "Nothing
was in it for me in terms of internal growth. It was like an exercise in
sensory deprivation. Nothing happened for ages, and when something did happen,
it was terribly depressing -- dolphins died.

"I began to hope that we would make a dolphin set and that animals would
be killed, just so I could record it. We knew this was going on all over the
ocean, dozens if not hundreds of times a day, and that a couple of hundred
thousand dolphins a year were dying. I needed some to die so I could document
it. If I'd been a member of the crew, and not been there on the sly, I could
have tried to save some dolphins, or something. But I was there just as an
observer, and not supposed to do anything to change what would normally have
taken place."

Much of LaBudde's career has been spent at sea -- fisherman, ice checker, NMFS
observer, spy -- but he does not feel particularly at home there. On the ocean he feels himself a transient. The biology that interests him most is terrestrial. His dream is not a long sail someplace but a long mountain walk northward, keeping pace with the breaking of spring up the Continental Divide.

"We'd come to port, and I'd buy everything I could get printed in English. I
read Moby-Dick, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, books by James
Joyce. That was the only real refuge I had out on the boat."

On making port in Panama City for the fourth time, LaBudde collected his
exposed tapes. He had stashed each one, as he shot it, in a plastic bag in his
bunk. In town he found a courier service and sent all the tapes to San
Francisco. He felt an enormous release. Five months on the Maria Luisa,
four of them spent at sea, and he had accomplished what he had set out to do.
Terra firma felt wonderful underfoot. For the rest of the day his step there
felt unnaturally light.` Two days later, when he called San Francisco for a
critique of the tapes, Stan Minasian, of the Marine Mammal Fund, told him that
he had succeeded better than they had dreamed. LaBudde asked if he should go
out again. Minasian told him not to bother. He had great stuff, everything they
needed; he should just come home.

Despite this advice, and after a fierce debate with himself, LaBudde decided to
make one more voyage. It had taken time, luck, and hard work for him to get
where he was on the Maria Luisa Once his film was made public, he
realized, perhaps no one would ever again be allowed to bring a camera aboard a
tuna seiner. On this final trip he would concentrate on taking still photos for
magazines.

On the day scheduled for departure he made breakfast aboard the seiner. He had
been away five days, and his galley was a disaster. As he began cleaning it, he
listened for the start-up of the engines. The sound did not come. He made lunch
and cleaned up the lunch dishes. The boat remained silent. He walked down to
the engine room. The crew had pulled the heads off one of the two generator
motors and were unbolting the big pistons and shoving them up through the top
of the block. LaBudde reached in and ran his hands over the crankshaft. He felt
big grooves worn in it -- not a good sign. He asked the jefe de machina, a Peruvian he liked, how many days the engine would be down. Seven to ten, the
engineer answered. LaBudde's resolve buckled. By now every face on the ship was
deadly familiar, every nook in his galley, every cup and paring knife, every
move to his job. The odd, tense monotony of his double life at sea was one
thing, but a week in the harbor was another.

He gathered his things, resigned, and flew from Panama. The generator was never
fixed, he later learned.

Three days after LaBudde jumped ship, the Maria Luisa went out with one
bad generator. She made one more set on dolphins and then the main engine blew
up, killing two men. She was towed back to harbor.

Thoroughly a Fisherman

IN 1947 AUGUST FELANDO WAS A YOUNG CREWMAN aboard the Western Sky, one
of the first tuna vessels to fish with nets on dolphins. It was an exciting
time to be a fisherman. The Western Sky's first sets on dolphins were
experimental, unpredictable, an adventure. Dolphin release in that era was
manual. Felando splashed with his crewmates in the nets, lowering the corkline
and manhandling dolphins over it to freedom, being careful of their sharp
teeth. Today the former fisherman, a trim, graying man, is the president of the
American Tunaboat Association. He was reluctant to give me an interview.

"I don't know what background you have," he said, "or whether when I use a word
you really understand the word." His experience with the media had been
unhappy. They took only bits and pieces of an argument, he said, and in the
resulting stories tuna fishermen always fared badly. He was not overjoyed to
learn that I come from Oakland.

"Oakland, California, is a suspect area," he said. He laughed, but not very
merrily. "You people don't have any tuna industry up there. The industry
started down here, in southern California. Up there, it's mostly orientated to
environmental organizations. Who don't know the story, in my opinion. Who are
using the story. Earth Island Institute and the Marine Mammal Fund,
which got on this issue about three years ago, decided this was a wonderful
issue for them to get started on -- these two new organizations. I'm sure you'regetting all the other side. Because the more they get their name out there, the more money they get. It's on record now. One estimate is that these
animal-rights organizations generate between two hundred million and a half a
billion dollars a year. "

This was, oddly enough, the same complaint the environmentalists made about the
fishermen. San Francisco's bearded, vaguely hippified dolphin-activists had
told me that the tuna captains were just a bunch of millionaires. In San Diego
I would find no nut-brown, leathery old salts mending nets, they predicted; no
calluses and squint lines. I would find a small club of swarthy, overweight
millionaires in polyester, with gold Rolexes and dripping gold chains. The
captains made such an unsympathetic impression, the environmentalists said,
that the American Tunaboat Association discouraged them from talking to the
press.

I brought up the environmentalists' arguments, and Felando dismissed them one
by one. Proposed alternatives to dolphin sets -- setting on drift logs, baitfish, or aggregation buoys instead -- were impractical, he said. For one thing, any shift to log sets, or to sets on schools of skipjack, would mean a shift to younger fish. Only juvenile yellowfin hang out under logs and with skipjack. For yellowfin, association with dolphins is a kind of rite of passage. When the tuna grow big and powerful enough to hold their own with dolphins, they leave their pals the skipjack and the security of drift logs. "You have to think of a porpoise school very much like a piece of debris or kelp, or some other thing," Felando explained. "We don't know why, but tuna will be attracted to certain floating objects. We consider porpoise just a faster floating object."

If you targeted younger fish, he asked, what were the implications for tuna
conservation? A shift from big fish -- from mature yellowfin that had
reproduced -- to juvenile fish would mean a reduction in the "yield per recruit" and would have an impact on the future.

(This proposition is counterintuitive. One would think that removing breeding
animals from a population would reduce future stocks more sharply than removing
juveniles, the age-class in which the higher mortality occurs in nature. But
things are often topsy-turvy in the sea. Tuna are prolific spawners, the number
of breeding adults may be less important than one would think, and what Felando
says may make sense in some way I can't figure out. Population dynamics are
still largely a mystery in the ocean.)

"Fishing tuna on porpoise, you're generally farther outside and a little safer
from seizures," he added. "Some countries enforce two-hundred-mile laws. That's
another element, though we don't talk about it too much. When you're forced to
go inshore, you're basically picking up small fish and taking the risk in
certain countries of seizure."

That Panamanian boat in the Sam LaBudde film was completely atypical, even of
the foreign fleet, Felando said. The vessel was built in France. The captain
was from Spain and had never before fished in the ETP. (In fact Joseba trained
for a year on a U.S. tuna seiner in the ETP, but he had never skippered a boat
there. ) That disaster set on eastern spinners -- ten or twelve yellowfin caught at a cost of 200 dead dolphins -- was folly. In 1987, Felando said, the average catch in the U.S. fleet had been a little better than eighteen tons per set.

A seal bomb, according to Felando, was not the infernal device the
environmentalists portrayed it to be. "It's a device that's been okayed by the
U.S. government for a long time. But it makes a wonderful emotional stupidity
to talk about it. Look, the use of sound impacts fish and porpoise. To prevent
the fish from going out underneath the boat, and to push the porpoise toward
the open end of the backdown, you make all kinds of sound and use all kinds of
devices to make a disturbance. The word bomb means so many things to so many
people. It's just the wrong word. It's a firecracker. Forty grains of
powder. No more than forty grains. So basically it's a non-issue, but it makes
wonderful print: 'Well, look at these heartless fishermen, using bombs to kill
and maim porpoise.' There's just no evidence of that whatsoever.

"The fishermen are always characterized as mean guys. They're killing the
porpoise, they don't give a damn about them. It's so far from the truth, it
just hurts us. Some years ago these outfits were hiring PR firms, sending
packets to schools. Comic books showing how God-awful the fishermen are.
We see a lot of negativism, and it has an impact on us. We've had children of
fishermen -- because of insensitive teachers who don't know what they're talking about -- we've had children come home crying.

"They don't talk about the fact that we had a young fisherman, a skipper's son,
get killed trying to save porpoise. He was hit by a shark. In August, 1980. His
name was . He never saw his child. He was hit in the shoulder as he was pulling
the porpoise over."

The argument of this last episode, like the teeth of the shark, cuts both ways,
I could not help thinking. The environmentalists argue that NMFS mortality
estimates for dolphins, in making no allowance for shark attack on dolphins
leaving the net, are serious underestimates. Correia's death bears this out.
The shark had not even waited for the dolphin that Correia was aiding to leave
the net. The young fisherman's effort had been heroic -- the only help possible
for dolphins in those circumstances -- yet in a sense he had merely been helping them from the frying pan into the fire.

"The fact is," Felando continued, "there's so many motivations for fishermen to
release the porpoise alive that the characterization given fishermen is just
absolutely wrong. The longer you're in a set, the less competitive you are. The
faster you get to the backdown, the better off you are. I see a correlation
between top production and top release records. We have an award -- we've had it for more than nine years now -- called the Golden Porpoise Award. It goes to the skipper who has the best release record, based on observer reports. The guy who won last year encircled a hundred and fifty-three thousand porpoise over five observed trips in that year. His total mortality was two hundred and four
porpoise. The total tonnage he caught was over four thousand nine hundred tons
of fish."

I asked Felando if that skipper, or some other, would be a good man for me to
interview. He hesitated.

"Our policy right now is less said, best said, on this goddamn issue. Because
we just don't win. We just don't win."

Now and again in our conversation Felando revealed how much he remains a
fisherman at heart. We digressed once to ponder the tuna-dolphin association.
The riddle of that relationship puzzles fishermen, and nature writers, from the
moment they first stumble upon it.

"You have a school of bait and they go into a ball," Felando said. "They ball
up for the protection that gives them. Experience tells you that tuna don't
generally go into that ball. They don't rip right through it. They work on the
fringes. But a whale or a marine mammal or a porpoise, they explode right into
that ball of bait. The fishermen feel that's one of the reasons tuna associate
with porpoise. Porpoise will scatter the bait and make it available for the
tuna."

For me, this was an illumination. It made more sense than any theory yet. I had
seen big fish feed around the edges of bait balls. I knew of the propensity of
dolphins to smash through those balls. I had never thought to put the two
together.

"Right!" I said. "The dolphins scatter the bait for the tuna. And the converse
would be that the tuna concentrate the bait for the dolphins."

"Well," Felando said. He paused. "I don't know."

He had never considered the second proposition, I realized. He had never
contemplated the dolphin's side of the equation. He was so thoroughly a
fisherman that he saw the problem only from the point of view of fish.

Later Felando surprised me again. In explaining why a reversion to the old
style of tuna fishing -- "bait fishing" with rod and line -- was impossible, he
asked, "How would you get bait? Who would let you into their waters to get
bait? Yes, Latin countries let us in once, but times have changed. Times have
changed. And the baiting grounds have changed with progress. Estuaries are no
longer there. Lagoons are no longer there."

"Because of ... ?"

"Man! Because of man. Man has changed the coastline."

He delivered the M-word with all the bitterness of an environmental radical.
The next moment, though, he headed off the other way.

"The way I look at it, the porpoise, whether people like it or not, is a food
fish. Porpoise means 'pork fish.' That's the Latin word for it. You can
directly take porpoise, which is a very high-protein food, or you can use it
for another purpose. Some people say let them alone. Don't touch 'em at all. I
don't think that's realistic in this world of ours. What I think we're doing is
providing a use for that animal. We're using them to catch food."

In Augie Felando I had found, I thought, the old salt the environmentalists
denied existed. In his taxonomy and terminology, at least, he was an
ancient salt. It was wonderful, in the twentieth century, to hear
cetaceans referred to as "fish." I had last encountered this in reading those
discussions of "loose fish" and "fast fish" in Moby-Dick. Of all the
modern human beings who have regular commerce with dolphins, only tuna men
still confuse "porpoise" and dolphin. The porpoises, family Phocoenidae, are
the smallest of cetaceans and do not associate with tuna. The oceanic dolphins,
family Delphinidae, are larger animals, three species of which regularly
associate with tuna.

"It's not so much a controversy," Felando insisted, "as people make it a
controversy. Basically, the fishermen have solved the problem."

"Well," I said, "what the environmentalists are saying is that the problem
isn't solved. They say that the allowable mortality of 20,500 is too many."

"No. What they say, really, is that one is too many. And so the real question
is, what is your personal view of management of living animals? Should there be
some management of living resources in the ocean? Or should we just not touch
them?"

My vote was for not touching them, but I was vague on why I felt that way. It
puzzles me, for example, that there is no group for the preservation of
Thunnes albacares. Yellowfin tuna are miraculous creatures, hydrodynamic
marvels wrought in silver and gold, the finest things in their line, just as
dolphins are the finest in theirs. "Making this moral distinction between
killing dolphins and killing tuna is a little peculiar, I guess," I told
Felando.

He liked the point, and laughed. "Yes," he said. "I mean, what is the
difference?"

"Well, there's a big difference. One animal is much more intelligent. But what
does that mean? Why should intelligence be the criterion? It's a little
narcissistic of us, isn't it, to value dolphins because of that?"

"Are you really saying that one is more intelligent than the other?" he asked.
"Have you read some of the literature on how, quote, 'intelligent' porpoises
are?"

I was taken aback. All the literature I had read indicated that dolphins were
very intelligent indeed. The suggestion that tuna and dolphins are on a par
intellectually was a new one on me. Felando and I had been spending our time in
different libraries.

"Yellowfin are beautiful," he said. "If you've ever seen them leaping, they're
beautiful things. And so are porpoise. People don't make gods out of porpoise,
but they come pretty doggone close to it. Because there's so much money in
it."

August Felando was entirely right, I thought, about dolphins and the human
penchant for myth-making. He was entirely wrong about the reasons for it.

The Remorseless Working of Things

IN "THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS," AN ESSAY THAT appeared in Science in
1968, Garrett Hardin uses "tragedy" in its old Greek sense. As Alfred North
Whitehead explained it, "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It
resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of shines."

Hardin asks us to imagine a common pasture open to all. Each herdsman, he
points out, can be expected to try to keep as many cattle as possible on the
commons. Through the centuries in which wars, poaching, and disease keep
everyone's herd in check, the commons accommodates all. But finally comes
social stability and a day of reckoning. The range reaches carrying capacity
and the remorseless working of things begins. "What is the utility to me
of adding one more animal to my herd?" the herdsman asks, as he always has. The
advantage he gains from each additional cow is considerable, and it accrues all
to him. The disadvantage of additional cows -- overgrazing -- seems negligible and is shared with all the other herdsmen. If he doesn't add a cow, he thinks, then someone else is likely to do so. A rationalist, he adds the cow, and so do all his fellow herdsmen. "Therein is the tragedy," Hardin writes. "Each man is
locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

On the commons of the open sea, the fisherman does not add animals, he extracts
them, but the same ruinous dynamic is in effect. Pursuing his own best
interests, the California sardine fisherman destroyed that fishery by the
1930s. The Peruvian anchovy fisherman -- with some help from El
Niño -- ruined that seemingly inexhaustible fishery by the mid-1970s. Few scientists are worried as yet about the stocks of yellowfin tuna. The tunas are migratory species with high reproductive potential. They are superb predators whose niche is not likely to be appropriated by others, should their numbers drop low. There is a certain safety factor built into modern tuna fishing as well, for fishing by seiner will theoretically cease to be commercially feasible long before tuna populations drop dangerously low. (It's worth pointing out, a cautionary note, that the sea's plenty has caused egregious miscalculation by our scientists before. "I believe that probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible that is to say, nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish," the great T. H. Huxley wrote scarcely a century ago.) But whatever the fate of tuna, dolphin reproductive potential is not high. What the tuna-seining fisherman adds is a new wrinkle to Hardin's theory, a footnote to commons law. The tuna seiner locks himself into a system that compels him to destroy the dolphins that he and his predecessors have used for millennia to find fish.

Hardin proposes a number of corollary propositions, all of which the
tuna-dolphin tragedy validates.

"Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial," he writes. "The
individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even
though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers." Late last year
Australia's 60 Minutes captured a wonderful sample of psychological
denial, and its special language.

"Why do you have to set nets on dolphins?" the interviewer asks Charles
Fullerton, the director of the Southwest Region of the NMFS.

"You can't take one without the other, in the case of this fishery," Fullerton
answers.

(A small denial of truth to start things off. Purse seiners in the ETP can, and
often do, set on schools of baitfish or on drift logs that have attracted
tuna.)

"Other animals we kill for food are not killed this cruelly," the Australian
suggests.

"Oh, I don't think that's true. In these slaughterhouses, with all the
chickens, pigs, cows, we have the same kind of cruelty."

"You don't see a cow dragged over a flywheel with its legs torn off."

"No, you don't. And you don't see that very often on American tuna boats,
either."

(Here the denial of truth is truly eerie. If, as Charles Fullerton and other
spokesmen for the NMFS, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, and the
American Tunaboat Association claim, no large-scale dolphin killing and maiming
occurs on U.S. vessels -- if the Panamanian boat in LaBudde's film doesn't
represent our fleet -- then how exactly are 20,500 dolphins killed
annually in U.S. nets? To make such a claim, Fullerton cannot have listened to
his own observers. "What you've seen in Sam LaBudde's film is exactly what I
saw aboard U.S. tuna boats," Kenneth Marten says, and other observers echo
that. )

"How are they killed any more humanely in American nets?" the interviewer
asks.

"I will not speak to you about what's humane or not," Fullerton replies. "I
don't know how a dolphin dies. Other than now he's alive or he's dead. The
result is exactly the same."

"No, the result is with dolphins you prolong it for hours. "

"You don't prolong drowning by several hours. You drown in several minutes.
Some people will say -- and I'm not defending any drowning of any dolphins --
drowning is one of the most delightful ways to go, if you have to go. I've
never been there, I can't tell you."

"Conscience is self-eliminating," Hardin writes. On this point the U. S. tuna
industry, the NMFS, and the environmentalists all pretty much agree. The U.S.
fleet now has "conscience" -- if that's the right word for the mandatory good
behavior required by the Marine Mammal Protection Act -- and the U.S. fleet is in decline. In 1979 the U.S. fleet in the ETP included ninety-eight large, Class 6 tuna seiners. In 1989 just thirty remained. Many of the departed seiners have reflagged to avoid high U.S. operating and labor costs and to escape the MMPA and other U.S. regulations. This growth of the foreign fleet has been the trend most destructive of dolphins, for fewer constraints operate on foreign vessels and their kill rate is now several times that on American boats. In 1972, when the MMPA was enacted, U.S. boats were responsible for seven eighths of the dolphin kill; today they are responsible for less than a sixth.

"Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" is the solution, according to Hardin.
This was the intent of the MMPA, with its regulations for the U.S. tuna
industry and its provisions for an embargo on tuna from foreign nations that
fail to set up comparable regulatory programs. This is where the NMFS and other
agencies have failed us badly, and failed the dolphins worse.

An Unacceptable Method of Fishing

SAM LABUDDE AND HIS FILM APPEARED ON ABC AND CBS national newscasts, on NBC's
Today show, and on local newscasts around the country.

"The networks were not overjoyed when they heard we had eight-millimeter
videotape by an amateur," says David Phillips, of Earth Island. "They were
surprised at the quality. They bumped it up to a one-inch master without any
difficulty. I don't know how Sam learned to get pictures as good as he got. He
read the manual as he was bouncing around in the waves on a speedboat. Until
Sam, we lacked the indisputable visual evidence. It's very difficult to know
what's happening out there. Sam's film has made it a lot more visceral. It's
given us an access to the media we've never had. It's galvanized the
environmental community, and it's forced the industry to respond."

LaBudde testified and showed his film before Congress at reauthorization
hearings last year for the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Those hearings were a
lesson in the subtler workings of the tragedy of the commons in a modern
republic. The senators expressed much admiration for progress made by the U.S.
industry. They decried the ruthlessness of the foreign fleet. (Not many votes
are lost in xenophobia.) "The U.S. industry has an excellent record," said
Senator John Breux, of Louisiana, in whose constituency fishermen are strong.
"I'll add my voice to the swelling chorus of praise for the domestic industry,"
said Senator Pete Wilson, of California. Senator Wilson is a former mayor of
San Diego, where the U.S. fleet is based.

The senator's swelling chorus of praise is in fact a two part harmony between
the U.S. industry and politicians like himself. The U.S. industry invented
purse seining on dolphins and for fifteen years monopolized the technique. The
U.S. industry killed millions of dolphins in the early years of tuna seining,
and in the seventeen years since the MMPA was enacted, the U.S. industry has
killed more than 800,000. The U.S. tuna industry has fought every regulation
intended to reduce the dolphin kill. In 1980 an NMFS prohibition against
"sundown" sets -- implemented because the kill rate is up to four times as high
at night as it is in daytime -- was dropped, under pressure by U.S. industry
lobbyists, after being in effect for just eight days. In 1981 the American
Tunaboat Association sued to scrap the NMFS observer program. The observers'
data, they argued, should not be used for enforcement. They won an injunction
that kept all NMFS observers off U.S. tuna boats from 1981 to 1984, when the
injunction was overturned on appeal. (At present the U.S. industry is suing to
keep women observers off U.S. tuna boats.) In the late 1970s, when forced to do
so, the U.S. industry demonstrated considerable inventiveness in coming up with
gear and techniques to minimize dolphin kills. That research is stalled, and
the U.S. industry has done nothing favorable to dolphins lately.

The separation of the U.S. and foreign tuna industries is in fact a kind of
myth. In the past ten years two thirds of the big U.S. seiners have reflagged
with foreign fleets. Apparently, little more than the flag has changed.
American captains still skipper some of those boats, and available evidence
suggests that the new ownership is often only nominal. Three U.S. corporations,
H.J. Heinz (which owns Star-Kist), Pillsbury (Bumblebee), and Ralston-Purina
(Chicken of the Sea), sell most of the tuna consumed in the United States.
Sensibly, they buy their fish where it is least expensive. Yellowfin tuna from
the Maria Luisa may be sitting in a can on your shelf.

At the MMPA reauthorization hearings several senators expressed their
displeasure with the NMFS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, for their failure to implement the regulations that
would keep that can off the shelf. Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts,
pointed out that the MMPA was amended in 1984 to require foreign nations to
demonstrate that they had dolphin-saving programs similar to our own or face a
ban on imports of their tuna. Why had the NMFS taken four years to formulate
"interim final regulations" to that end?

"It's a very delicate operation to get those regulations," explained Charles
Fullerton, of the NMFS. "We developed some over a year ago which were not
acceptable either to the tuna industry or to the foreign nations. So we went
back to the drawing board and developed a whole new set, the ones that are now
in interim phase. We'd like to give these a try."

How could a bureaucrat in a regulatory agency so lose track of his mission? The
proposed NMFS regulations were not acceptable to the tuna industry or the
foreign nations -- the regulatees -- so of course the regulators scrapped
them?

At the reauthorization hearings the environmental community asked for a
phase-out, over four years, of tuna seining by dolphin encirclement. What they
won was a prohibition -- once again -- on sundown sets. They won 100 percent
observer coverage for trips by the U.S. fleet. They won a set of performance
standards, a system by which the skippers most dangerous to dolphins would lose
their licenses. They won a requirement that by the end of 1989 foreign
countries must reduce their kill rate to double the U.S. rate, and by 1990 to
1.25 times the U.S. rate, or face embargo. Sam LaBudde and his colleagues
regard these as the tiniest sorts of victory. No end to the dolphin killing is
yet on the horizon.

"We had practically the entire environmental community back at the
reauthorization hearings, everyone from Audubon to the Humane Society," LaBudde
says. "Twenty-eight national environmental organizations wanted purse seining
stopped. Eliminated. We asked for a four-year phase-out. That would give
the Marine Mammal Protection Act twenty years to do what it was
designed to do -- reduce kills to insignificant levels approaching zero. We
thought four more years was a reasonable time. We got beat by the owners of
thirty-five tuna boats."

LaBudde now divides his work day between Earth Island Institute and the Marine
Mammal Fund. The two outfits have resorted to a tuna boycott and to litigation.
In January of this year they successfully sued the NMFS and the tuna industry
to force all concerned to abide by the provision for 100 percent observer
coverage.